Arches Project Bulletin – January 2022


 

Arches Project Bulletin

News, Resources, Events and Community Highlights

January 2022

A Look Back at Arches in 2021 and
Looking Ahead to 2022

Dear Arches Community,

The past year has been a productive one for the Arches Team with a considerable amount of software development having been accomplished that has extended and enhanced the Arches Platform. Version 6.0 was released in October, and numerous other enhancements were worked on, some of which are completed while others are still in progress. For example, we completed the Arches/Esri Integration; released an alpha version of Arches for Science; made considerable progress on full Internationalization of Arches; launched a new and significant project to create a state-of-the-art Reference Data Manager; and more. The broader Arches community has also been busy, with new implementations of Arches released (e.g., Isle of Man) and others very close to completion (e.g., Greater London Historic Environmental Record [GLHER]). Furthermore, a new Arches User Group was formed for the US; five new international Arches-based projects were launched by Arcadia-funded initiatives, and projects to implement Arches are being advanced by Parks Canada, the Auckland City Council, and the City and County of San Francisco. We predict that 2022 will be an even busier year for the Arches community!

Powered By Arches in 2021 and Beyond
A screenshot from the implementation of the Historical Maps of Candia by the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Heraklion, Greece

In 2021, the Arches team became aware of several new implementations that are Powered by Arches. (Please be sure to let us know of any implementations that we may not be aware of. See details below.)

Historical Maps of Candia
The Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), in Heraklion, Greece, launched a pilot instance of Arches that provides information on the historical maps of Candia (old name for Heraklion, Crete). The CIDOC CRM-based data model implemented provides a new innovative way to manage historical cartographic information that permits their integration with other cultural heritage resources.

Heritage Geoportal of Cantón Nabón, Ecuador
The Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain), with the collaboration of the Universidad del Azuay (Ecuador) and the Instituto Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural de Ecuador (INPC), has implemented Arches for the heritage management of Cantón Nabón, a rural area of the Ecuadorian highlands with a large set of cultural and natural heritage assets. The system allows 3D geovisualization of the documented elements with geomatics techniques, as well as alphanumeric information organized according to the new data model implemented in Spanish. Likewise, thanks to Arches Collector, the heritage monitoring of the assets is being carried out in compliance with the preventive conservation cycle of the heritage.

InVisu Les Résidences
The InVisu research unit, under France’s Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), has implemented Arches for its program “les Résidences” to offer young art history and material culture researchers online publication of their corpus through a residency fellowship. Three corpuses have been published or are being processed to date: “Artémise” is an almost exhaustive compilation of Anne of Austria’s representations; “A. Beurdeley à Paris” illustrates the process of creating furniture and objets d’art during the 19th century; the third corpus (anticipated spring 2022) will be a comprehensive database of the findings discovered in Bab el-Gasous (Egypt) funeral complex.

A notable implementation launched in 2021 was the Isle of Man Historic Environment Record, implemented by Manx National Heritage, the charity responsible for the care and promotion of Isle of Man’s natural and cultural heritage. The Isle of Man Historic Environment Record includes information about many of the Island’s historic places, archaeological sites, landscapes and historic buildings, and it cleverly utilizes Knowledge Integration’s middleware, CIIM, to link to their museum objects.

Coming soon!
Other projects being developed that are using Arches include the following:

To note: Arches has been implemented by organizations worldwide, and we are always enthusiastic to discover new and upcoming implementations. If you would like your implementation featured on our website, email us at contact@archesproject.org. Please provide a brief description (<100 words), a screenshot, and a link to the implementation if it has been made public or to other published material.

Community Highlights

Community Forum Transition
Last year we announced the successful transition of the Arches Community Forum from Google Groups to Discourse. Since our launch on June 1st, we’ve had more than 160 members sign-up for the new forum, engaging in a variety of topics, from technical troubleshooting to general Arches-related discussion and event planning. For those new to the forum, we welcome you to introduce yourself on the Introductions thread and provide feedback, comments, and suggestions for the forum moving forward.

Webinars and Community Calls
Intro to Arches, Part 3 Webinar – The webinar “Intro to the Arches Platform, Part 3 of 4: Data Technology Concepts”, hosted in January, details the key ways in which Arches can help organizations meet their data management goals through the data modeling process. Learn about the Arches Package Library, modeling documentation, resources, and training materials provided by the Arches Resource Model Working Group (ARM WG).Intro to Arches, Part 4 Webinar – The webinar “Intro to the Arches Platform, Part 4 of 4: Information Architecture”, hosted in April, focuses on how the modular design of Arches allows for rapidly deploying applications that can help you manage valuable resource data. It examines real-world examples of how resource models, report templates, plugins and workflows can streamline data presentation and management. 

Forum Transition Community Call – The Arches team hosted a community call in May about the transition of the Arches forums from Google Groups to Discourse. This meeting allowed the community to ask questions and learn how they might participate on the new forum. Sign up for the community forum here: https://community.archesproject.org/

The webinar and community call recordings are available to watch online at https://www.archesproject.org/videos/

 

Arches UK Users’ Group Meeting Recording, June 10, 2021

Community-led Meetings: User Groups and Meetups
UK Users Group – The second meeting of the UK Arches User Group, hosted in June, highlighted numerous implementations, including: Greater London Historic Environment Record (GLHER/Keystone); Jersey Historic Environment Record (Jersey HER); Isle of Man Historic Environment Record (Isle of Man HER); Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA); Maritime Endangered Archaeology (MarEA). These presentations were followed by brief overviews of several other projects utilizing Arches. Watch presentations here.US User Group – The inaugural meeting of the US Arches Users Group took place virtually in November 2021, and a second meeting was held in January 2022. Consisting of US-based heritage organizations, service providers and developers, the group is seeking to share knowledge about implementing Arches and to potentially collaborate on mutually beneficial Arches software development and methodologies. Learn more on the Community Forum.Kubernetes Virtual Meetups – Several members of our developer community participated in remote meetups in May and September to discuss the technical requirements for supporting the use of Kubernetes in an Arches implementation. Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. This community-driven initiative discussed possible enhancements to Arches deployment workflows and documentation.

Arches User Groups are community-led efforts to bring Arches implementers and users together regularly to discuss common issues and potentially pool efforts. They can be organized based on geographic region, thematic category, domain, technological issue or any other category. Meetups are also community-driven and are usually focused on specific topics. Anyone can create and organize a new user group or meetup, but if you would like some guidance or help, please contact the Arches Team at contact@archesproject.org.

Conferences
CoSTAR – Members of the Arches team presented during the Summer 2021 Module of the Conservation Science Training and Research (CoSTAR) program, which seeks to strengthen the practice of conservation science in India. View video recordings of two Arches-focused presentations: a general talk on Arches that was open to the general public and an Arches for Science session that was open to program participants, which outline development that will extend the Arches platform to secure, retrieve, visualize, compare, and share heritage science data, and manage tasks in the lab.

IPERION HS Workshop – The workshop sessions, held in October, included an Update on Arches For Science (see video). Getty Conservation Institute Scientist Catherine Patterson and Arches developer Dennis Wuthrich of Farallon Geographics shared an overview of recent development of data management features that will be available in Arches for Science.

 

Update on Arches For Science presented by Catherine Patterson, October 6, 2021

Recordings of these and past Arches-related conference sessions are available at https://www.archesproject.org/videos/

Development Highlights

Arches Internationalization
New development for the internationalization of Arches is well underway. This effort is generously supported by the Arcadia Fund in London. These contributions to the Arches platform will benefit all users who need to implement Arches in different languages and scripts or switch between multiple languages and scripts. See details in a recent press release discussing the Arcadia grant to the Getty Conservation Institute at: bit.ly/ArchesArcadiaNew Arches RDM Funded
The Arches team was happy to announce that a Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) proposal to develop a major upgrade for the Arches Reference Data Manager (RDM) was approved and funded by the Getty Board of Trustees. The Arches team will continue to engage Arches and RDM stakeholders worldwide to better understand and confirm their requirements for the next iteration of the RDM. Members of the community have also volunteered to contribute to the RDM redesign effort. Additional details will be shared later in the year.Version 6.0.0 – We were happy to announce that Arches v6 was released in October 2021. This major release includes numerous new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. For detailed information, see the Arches v6.0.0 release announcement on our Community Forum. Thank you to all those who have contributed to this effort, as well to those who updated Arches Documentation to reflect the latest changes.

Esri integration – The development of an add-in to Arches for Esri ArcGIS Pro that allows Esri users to directly access, edit, and synchronize Arches data from their Esri desktop GIS software was completed in 2021. This enhancement was truly a community effort, equally supported by Historic England, Farallon Geographics, and the Getty Conservation Institute. It is our hope that this work will establish a path for others in the community to build a similar integration with QGIS, which would provide a fully open source solution for those organizations that do not use proprietary products.

Accessibility – Historic England is finishing up a significant amount of work, which will bring the Arches UI in line with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The code submitted to the Arches development team by Historic England will be reviewed and tested in batches and subsequently integrated within the Arches core code.

Arches Resources

Updates to resources on archesproject.org
Translations of “What is Arches” page – Translations of the “What is Arches?” page are now available in Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin (Simplified). Thank you to Arches community members Hossam Mahdy for the Arabic translation, Sara Delgadillo and Cesar Bargues Ballester for the Spanish translation, and Gong Yipu, Jin Kui, and Po-Ming Lin for the Mandarin translation. Currently, translations of the page in French, Russian and Ukrainian are in progress. If you are interested in volunteering to translate the page in another language, please let us know via the Arches Community Forum or email at contact@archesproject.org. For other ways to participate in the Arches community, visit the “Participate in the Community” page.Arches Features page – The Arches Project Team is continually working to improve Arches documentation for the community and an example of this is the new Features page on the Arches website. This page categorizes and highlights Arches software features and capabilities and includes short video clips and references to webinars. We will continue to update this page as more features and webinars are released.Participate in the Community page – Are you looking for new ways to become involved as a member of the Arches open source community? Regardless of whether you’re an Arches implementer, developer, service provider, or newbie, we’ve compiled a list of opportunities to help you to navigate the many different ways to participate as part of the ever growing Arches community. These activities include:

  • contributing software code to share with other Arches implementers;
  • improving or extending existing documentation to help guide others in their work;
  • hosting an Arches-related event or engaging with a localized user group in your area;
  • or participating on the Arches Community Forum by assisting with troubleshooting or general questions about the Arches platform.

For more ways to get involved, check out our new Participate in the Community page.

Workflows Documentation
We are pleased to report that we have begun work to prepare documentation on defining Arches workflows. A workflow provides for a series of steps in the Arches user interface, with each step presenting a data entry form to a user. This documentation will allow software developers to take advantage of workflows to create data editing sessions that mirror business processes. For example, a workflow could be created to manage the data entry process and enforce the business rules related to tracking the status and outcomes of heritage impact assessments and heritage designations. Other examples include recording the location of a sample taken from a heritage object or place, describing the purpose of the sample, and the instrument used to analyze the sample. It is anticipated that this documentation should be completed in early 2022.

For a general overview of Arches workflows, check out the clip below from our August 2020 webinar on Arches Version 5.0.

 

Clip from webinar, Arches Webinar – Arches Version 5.0
(clip timestamp: 9:09 – 19:26)

Service Providers
Are you interested in launching an Arches implementation but do not have access to the technical skills required to do so? You may be interested in the Arches Service Providers webpage, where you can find a list of service providers who have demonstrated the ability to implement and customize Arches and who have agreed to abide by the Arches Community Code of Conduct. They offer a variety of services such as hosting, implementation installation and configuration, data ETL, application development, support and maintenance, and more.If you wish to be listed as a service provider on this page and have demonstrated expertise in any of these areas for an Arches implementation, please submit your name, contact information, and list of services offered to contact@archesproject.org.

Job & Bid Opportunities

Be sure to check out our Bid and Job Opportunities page where we feature Arches-related bid and job announcements that are brought to our attention. To date, we have recorded 29 job and bid opportunities from a variety of organizations worldwide. Here are the current openings:

Cultural Heritage Data Engineer at Yale University
Yale University is hiring a Cultural Heritage Data Engineer to work with the transformation, reconciliation, enrichment and management of its cultural heritage knowledge, which includes data managed in Arches. For more information on the position: https://bit.ly/Yale-Job

Software Engineer at Getty Digital
The Collection and Content Management Systems (CCMS) team at Getty Digital is hiring a Software Engineer to oversee their Arches implementation and data model work. This position manages, coordinates, and carries out technical aspects of projects related to data modeling efforts, working closely with content owners to develop semantic data structures using the Linked.Art ontology. For more information on this position: https://bit.ly/GDSoftwareEngineer

If you would like to post an Arches-related bid or job opportunity on our website, please post on the Arches forum with the relevant details, including a link to respond to or apply for the opportunity.

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Arches was created through a partnership between
the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund.
Copyright © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust and World Monuments Fund, all rights reserved.
Arches, Arches Project, and the Arches logo are trademarks of the J. Paul Getty Trust and World Monuments Fund.Our mailing address is:
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www.getty.edu/conservation
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 700
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